


killed many a foolish immortal

by TheTartWitch



Series: Twilight Remixes [4]
Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: F/M, Isabella is an ancient vampire, M/M, Seth deserves to be happy?, Victoria gets to die, and i wasn't pairing Edward up with Bella now..., and now she's sort of obsessive over his happiness?, because they pissed off Mama Bear Isabella and made Carlisle cry, hurt!Jasper, idek anymore, just wanted her to be his mentor but then she was lonely, she is sorta Carlisle's strict but loving mum, then James
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-02-14
Packaged: 2019-03-18 12:48:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13682004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheTartWitch/pseuds/TheTartWitch
Summary: It is the middling sixteen hundreds. The sewers beneath London are foul to even the humans’ senses, and it is the time of witch hunts and burning the innocents alongside the guilty.OrBella is older than Carlisle and so, so lonely.





	killed many a foolish immortal

**Author's Note:**

> This has not been edited, because I don't have a beta and none of my friends would look this over without laughing good-naturedly at me, so. Feel free to point them out as you find them? Or volunteer for the position, though I've kind of hit a slump and haven't written anything posting-worthy in a while.

It is the middling sixteen hundreds. The sewers beneath London are foul to even the humans’ senses, and it is the time of witch hunts and burning the innocents alongside the guilty. Isabella is alone, and for good reason: her former coven had had doubts about her ability to care for herself and attempted to impress them upon her through force. Now there is only Isabella, as there has always been.

She is not the only one of her kind left in the city; there are the simpler ones, caught in the middle of a fight they never anticipated, and the butchers, taking advantage of a storm to drink their fill. They all disgust her. None of them are true vampires, none of them are very true at all. None she would form a coven with, anyway.

It is just as well. Likely she’d just end up killing them if she did anyway.

\---

She goes out for a bit, desperate for something other than the scent of human waste and thirsty besides, and there is a manhunt in the streets. One of the butchers, deciding he’d catch more prey if it thought itself safe hunting him, has taken to the lanes and alleys, drawing them out and draining them dry. She has no real complaints. It keeps the beasts away from the productive humans and the children, which she would not tolerate. Biting children produced nothing but troubles, the likes of which had killed many a foolish immortal.

And he is there. The young one, yelling for his father and then seeing her, standing on the cobbled stone. She likely looks beautiful, even covered in sewage as she is; there is a reason the legends of sirens, enchanting women of the water who devour the ensnared and foolish, have such longevity. It is not his youth that stops her. He is old enough for biting and turning, if it comes to that. No, it is the way he has also stopped. The look in his eyes. It is some fear, yes, because he is not stupid. But mostly?

It is curiosity. She can hear the slow, quickening thump of blood in his chest, but his eyes and breath, they are waiting. They _observe_ her, taking in the details of her own eyes, the angles of her elbows and the slight glisten of her skin in the English sunlight, dreary though it is in the approaching dawn. He does not call out for his father, nor beg for his life, though doubtless he knows he is close to losing it. He is patient with her; she is intrigued.

She is before him in a breath, her hands cupping his face within them.

“What is your name?” She asks, because this one. This one will _belong_ among her kind, she can tell. There is something inside her that is escaping her command: _loneliness_. If she is to survive, she will need something to enforce that desire for companionship without being clingy and stupid.

His voice is like dust.

“Carlisle,” he whispers, eyes locked, hypnotized, in the path of her own.

His blood is good enough that she almost doesn’t stop.

\---

They go away for a while. The city is no place for a vampire child; too many things to break without being able to hide it, and draining the town of its citizens is likely to attract attention. They hunt through the woods, they run through the stretches of land they can, and eventually they swim across the ocean to America, a land of undiscovered people for Isabella and her charge.

Carlisle is quiet the first few weeks. What he has become frightens him as it once did for her, so she is patient. He will adjust to this life, or he will ask for it to be ended. He is cautious to request anything of her, though they have agreed to a diet of woodland animals instead of humans. It is an interesting challenge, one that she had not considered before, and so they commit to it. They each slip several times, eventually getting the hang of things.

She was right. He is the best entertainment.

He is a human doctor treating his patients for the Spanish Influenza. One of these is a woman, dying but loathe to leave her only son alone. Isabella knows he will not be: he too is not long for this world, and if there is anything after he will join her there.

When the woman dies, Carlisle begs for the boy’s salvation. He is cute this way, following her about the human residence they’d required for him to assume the role he wanted.

“Please,” he begs. “He is a child. Any illness, any injury, you said. Please.” At first she in unsure. Can they weather the storm this would bring them? Does he realize what he would need to give up for this plea of his?

She can see it clearly, though: he has thought this through. He understands what this would mean, as he brings it before her.

She stands for a moment, resting. Lowering the dramatic act that is her humanity. She considers him.

“Bring him here,” she tells him softly, so quietly no human ears will ever know what she is telling him. “I will look at him, and decide if I shall bite him or not.”

He does. Steals the boy right out of his hospital bed. The child is young for a human but still nearly through its adolescence. “Seventeen,” Carlisle tells her. If he still felt the urge to wring his hands, he would be in this moment. She can see it, the divide in his nature: he wants to please her, because she is his vampire sire and a sort of mother, almost, to him and has done many things for him without really asking for anything in return, but his compassionate nature is also pulling him towards this human boy and demanding he save them. She knows this struggle. It is as familiar to her as the way he smiles for her, or braids the hair down her back, the careful way he tends the many books they’ve collected in these years.

“I cannot do it,” she says to him, away from the human boy. She is perfect in her control as she is in all things, but temptation of this sort would ruin her perfect record. “You must do it, and if it is too much I will pull you back again. You are no match for me anymore, dearest.” He is young to their ways, but she is still the strongest thing in his world. He has never had the pleasure of meeting her uncles and aunts in their haven city, though no doubt they’d laugh at her idealistic young child and his need to be good, to have a soul in the way she is not even sure humans possess.

He looks at her, and even with his perfect face she can see the furrow in his brow, the widening of his eyes. He is nervous; he trusts her to keep her word to him but he is not sure if he is willing to risk his own.

The boy in the other room groans. One of her eyebrows arches.

Carlisle sighs and turns to go to him. She follows, ready, but in the end he doesn’t need her.

\---

The youngling, Edward, is more attached to her than they’d anticipated. Due to his mental abilities, she is a rock in the ocean, a lull in the otherwise deafening noise. He sits next to her and all is quiet again, as it once was. She doesn’t mind his company. Carlisle smiles to see them so familiar.

They have moved again, to a town in Wisconsin. Edward is of the appearance to attend school but they don’t send him. His control would not yet withstand such a test, and it would chafe, this desire to abide by their rules and yet, to drink. She soothes him at her side as Carlisle gets a job and leaves them to their modest house. It is nearly better in this age; she can claim a sun illness and none consider that she is a vampire, especially not once they see her beauty. Vampires are thought to be old, decrepit beasts in this era; she is a virtue, a goddess, vivid in her housewife’s dress and clucking humorously, mockingly, to her adopted son. It is unfortunate, she tells the neighbors, that she is unable to have her own children, but she is grateful for Edward’s appearance in their lives.

Here, she and Carlisle are married. It is easiest than answering as to why he sometimes slips and calls her ‘Mother’, though now that can be waved away by Edward’s involvement. Overall, they are perfect, and that is how they survive.

The years go by. Carlisle’s compassion earns them Esme, an ex-suicide and  the love of Carlisle’s existence; Rosalie, Carlisle’s surrogate daughter and a victim of domestic murder; Emmett, a hiker who stepped in front of a bear before Rosalie found him. Isabella warned Carlisle that Rosalie wouldn’t be anything important to Edward, but he had hoped. She found herself in Emmett, however, and Carlisle was moderately satisfied. But there was still Edward to consider, and his happiness.

They had moved each time, re-introducing themselves as something new and different in each place. They were as uninteresting as they could be, married or siblings or aunts or foster parents. With Esme to be Carlisle’s wife, Isabella was relegated the position of his elder sister, aunt to their many adopted children.

When Alice and Jasper, Isabella’s twin disasters, arrived, they were welcomed easily inside. Edward saw their true intentions, and Alice’s first words to them were “Grandmama! So good to meet you at last!” and Isabella had decided they could stay.

And then they were moving to Forks, Washington, and the scent of dog was on the wind.

\---

Isabella knew as soon as the scent was strong enough that these weren’t the vampire-eating wolves of the east. They were something else, something young and new, and so she allowed Carlisle his tentative peace talks and desire for a treaty. The wolves treated them with distrust and disdain, calling them “leeches” and “bloodsucker”, but Isabella ignored them. It was unimportant how they saw her, only how they agreed to Carlisle’s peace. He was determined to get along with them, to share the land and the people and convince them that he and his family could be trusted with such responsibility.

“And if others of you come, and hunt us?” asked one of the elders. He didn’t smell of wet dog; his scent was human and clear, refreshing in the face of the wolves’ stench. “What then will you do?”

Carlisle is loathe to promise anything without her consent; for all that he is the coven’s leader, she is Grandmother, eldest among them and his sire. Instincts demand he concede to her wishes.

In this instance, she cares naught for the others of their kind. Carlisle desires this, and she will allow it of him.

“First,” she says, and their heads whip to face her, “we will begin with the head. The limbs next, and the torso torn in half, and then the blaze. Is this unsatisfactory?” She peers down at them from the tree she had claimed curiously. “As of this treaty, by encroaching on you they encroach on us, and that is easily remedied. Violence is nothing new to some of our coven. I would volunteer myself.”

They stare at her, small and wild, and then return their attention to Carlisle. She turns her face to the sky. A storm is coming.

“My sire, Isabella,” Carlisle introduces her to the pack formally. “The eldest among us and likely to be the one patrolling. I am Carlisle, my mate Esme, and our children, Edward, Rosalie and her mate Emmett, and Alice and her mate Jasper.”

Edward’s face is conflicted. He is peering into the ranks of the wolves. Her hand brushes his arm, a question. There is a tiny, minute shake of his head, an answer in the negative.

“There is something…” he whispers, though everyone in the clearing can hear him. A pause, and he shakes his head again. “No,” he says, “it is nothing.”

\---

The years go by. The relationship between the wolves and the coven never progresses beyond cautiously optimistic and thoughtful until a particularly daring triad attempts to go through them for little Alice. They are near the border when Isabella catches up to them; she is unconcerned when the first wolves appear. She had started with the pretty female, the hunter’s mate, who had taunted Jasper with Alice’s impending demise as they fought. She began with the woman’s arm, the limb she had managed to tear from Jasper, and then took great delight in ripping her to pieces from the ankles up. When that was over, she caught the little hunter boy. There was no need to play as she had with the female, but she was fond of Alice and they had made Carlisle sad enough that had he been human still he might have cried.

In her old age she was powerful, and so she felt no fear in letting the wolves watch as she tore the young upstart to shreds and built him into a bonfire with his beloved. The final young one had already been caught by the wolves, she could smell the end in their fur, and so she nodded to them as she waited for the flames to die out.

One of them shifts back to talk to her. “What’s this all about, then?” He calls, and the memory of it makes her bare her teeth.

“Alice,” she tells them. “The triad had hunted her before, though her transformation was painful enough that she forgot. It was an accident, really, that they found her again and decided she’d make exciting prey.”

“And the bonfire?” He asks, voice soft. She snarls.

“The bitch got to Jasper first, intending to destroy him first before telling Alice all about it. The _fragmen stercore_ laughed.” She breathes deeply. The scent of fire and wolf keeps her anger from growing too far. “Jasper and Alice are important to the happiness of the coven. Carlisle was distressed, and that is...upsetting.”

They understand her meaning, and now they understand the coven’s devotion to itself. Threats to the coven, and by extension the pack, would not be tolerated.

\---

The young wolves are curious about their kind. The elders allow a night, once a month, wherein the pack and the coven gather, and are monstrous together with no humans to pretend for, and tell stories of their true natures. The wolves tell their origin stories; the vampires tell them of the way their smell is repellent, like warning them off of poison. Isabella tells them her theory, that they are not true werewolves but rather shapeshifters, that the wolf was convenient and strong enough to withstand the change and merge with them. They are intrigued by her mentions of the eastern werewolves and their abilities to hunt vampires.

“Ancient enemies to us,” she tells them around the bonfire. “I do not know how they came to be, but I suppose nature must find some way to keep balance. They were wild things, men with the minds of beasts and beasts without minds at all, and they hunted us no matter where we went. There are stories that they are the creations of a vampire, Lycaon, who strove to create a sort of blood supply for us to negate the necessity of humans, but the beings he created were terrible, monstrous things. They hated him for his treatment of them, and that hatred has since spread to the rest of us.”

“Lycaon is Greek,” one of the wolves tells her. “The original werewolf, they say. Are you Greek?”

“Who knows?” She asks, shrugging. “Certainly not I. Those were long years, and while I know I am old there are things that one cannot forget and yet others one wishes they could remember. Humanity is a fragile thing. We have broken ours to irreparable pieces and thrown it away; you trade yours out for something stronger.”

\---

It is at one of these bonfires that a young wolf imprints on Edward. He is sequestered among them, as always by her side, when his head whips around to stare at the arriving wolves. There is a young one standing at the head of the pack, human again, with eyes like something syruppy and drowning.

“Seth,” says another, a similar-smelling female, pulling at his arm to take a seat on a faded lawn chair beside her.

“It’s you,” Edward says, and they all pause. “When we first came, there was something wrong with the pack… it was you. You were missing.” Seth is nodding his head. They have yet to look away from each other.

One of the elder wolves slaps a palm to his face and groans loudly. Carlisle is smiling happily, glancing between his son and the young wolf in excitement. Isabella rolls her eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> I know she's ooc. That's how it worked out. *shrugs*  
> (The cussword she calls James is "piece of shit" in Latin, or as close as google translate can get. I don't know why, but she's always Roman to me? I tried looking up the origins of the "Isabella" name, but I didn't really plan on extrapolating on her background at any point, so I figured it didn't matter. We'll just say she forgot.)
> 
> Also, somebody should probably tell me why it's always Twilight AUs that get me out of writer's block's clammy fingers? Dunno.


End file.
